


Bartimaeus's Side of the Story

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bartimaeus tells *his* side of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bartimaeus's Side of the Story

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to jan for the Yuletide challenge--I'm afraid don't know a whole lot about anime or any of the other pairings you mentioned, and I didn't want to butcher them in trying to write a fic. ;) Hope you enjoy this! 
> 
> Written for jan

 

 

(#) indicates footnotes at the bottom of the story.

\--

Right. Fine. Here's how the story goes.

It was the fifth day of Paophi in the season of Akhet, in the reign of Ptolemy IX Soter II, the Great Chief, the first among his brethren, the Prince of the Company of the Gods, the establisher of Right and Truth throughout the World. I think it was a hot afternoon.

I was standing in the middle of a puff of smoke, summoned to my young master's study. When it cleared away I got a close look at him; he had a blanket wrapped around his skinny shoulders and his clothes were sopping wet, dripping puddles on the floor.

Odd. The prince hated swimming; he preferred his library full of books and papyri. Had he had an accident? I worried--and wondered at myself, fretting like a hobbling old grandmother.

But no. He was beaming, his hair plastered to his face, his eyes bright. "Rekhyt, I--the most wondrous thing, the most amazing--no, I summoned you here... I need your help, you must help me. You can't understand, it happened so quickly, I myself can't even..."

"Did you hit your head on the way in?" I pointed to a tunic worth three hundred deben now completely soaked through.

"No, Rekhyt, no..." His lips were turning blue, he was shivering from the damp, and his grin was splitting his face in half. "No. Rekhyt, I have fallen in love."

Mogret's tail (1), I'd rather he'd hit his head. He looked stupid and foolish sitting perched on the chair, like a spindly-legged bug-eyed frog with a clump of weed stuck to the side of his head; his face was too thin for his smile, it stretched out past his ears, and I wanted to roll my eyes--the usual, when dealing with humans--and smile back at him. It was amusing and yet I couldn't help feeling... fond, perhaps, if that was the word. It was a strange and uncomfortable sensation for me.

"Oh," I said, for the lack of anything better to say. I'd come up with something now, something witty and sarcastic and perfectly devastating, and tell you I said it, but I suppose if I'm telling you how I got that scar I should be as truthful as possible. I was terribly confused at the time; Ptolemy could do that to me. Every other human I've ever met has been so easy to learn, to judge, always the same, over and over again, endlessly and depressingly. Not Ptolemy.

"You must find her," he babbled, his teeth chattering; I snapped my fingers in spite of myself and lit the torches standing around the room. "What? Oh. Thank you. Rekhyt, you must find her--she lives on the Nile, her father trades up and down the river, a boat with clean white sails and carved snakes on the prow--"

"How did you get in the water?" I interrupted.

"What?" Once again he looked blankly at me, and this time I felt unsettled. He was normally so alert and attentive, that look felt... wrong. Like something had been done to him. "I... there was an accident. Yes. I fell off the boat and she pulled me out. She saved me."

"Why were you on the boat?" Where were your bodyguards? I wanted to add. Why did you fall off? What's happened to you?

He merely stared until my skin started to itch and I fidgeted. "Please find her, Rekhyt," he said finally, and his voice was plaintive. Pleading me. His eyes were unnaturally huge in his face.

I zipped outside in the form of a fly and zoomed over to a stand of palm trees. Ptolemy's other djinns, Affa and Penrenutet, were sitting in the shade and passing a jug of wine between them (2). Penrenutet was lounging underneath a tree with his heels kicked up, not a single hair or thread or follicle out of place; Affa was propped up at an angle, the straps falling off her dress, her eyes smudged with burnt-black kohl. They looked like the proud, insolent, insufferable snots they were.

"Get up, I need your help," I whined, stinging them on their bare legs and necks. Penrenutet bared his teeth and swatted at me; I changed into a dog and snapped my jaws back at them. "Ptolemy's cursed. He's got some sort of spell on him, he says he's in love."

Affa started laughing, then, and I tore at the hem of her dress until she shrieked and aimed a Detonation at me. "Ptolemy's a young man now, Bartimaeus. Humans fall in love, that's how they breed and make more humans."

"Ptolemy spent all of yesterday calculating the right angles of forty-seven different triangles and writing out their respective equations," I shot back.

"So he's met some river-rat on the wharf and become infatuated, it's nothing--"

"He doesn't remember how he got on the boat," I shouted, over Penrenutet. "Or her name."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Detonation."

"Stipples."

"Unfortunate Hug!"

"Mogret's tail," Penrenutet complained, looking at Affa and groaning, and they got to their feet. We flew over the heads of the palace servants as swallows, fluttering through the trees, winging our way to the banks of the Nile.

The docks were crowded, the market out in full force. The stink of humans was in our nostrils--blood, sweat, garbage, spices, rotting fish, steam from cooking fires, the air thick with the heat--and the paths were pressed tight with bodies jostling each other, ladies fanning themselves and horses walking slow with their heads drooping. Affa perched on the edge of an awning, twittering and blinking her sparrow eyes from side to side. "We're looking for..."

"A boat with snakes on the prow," I mutter half to myself, fluffing my feathers. "And white sails."

"I can't see anything in this--"

"Wait," I said suddenly, and hopped down from my perch. There was a faint wisp of smoke, an unfurling in the air, and the prince--my master--stepped out from under the awning and looked up at the two sparrows. "I'm going like this. Follow me."

"I swear, Bartimaeus..." Affa grumbled, but they changed into dragonflies and zipped along behind me, buzzing and fluttering bright wings. I threaded my way through the crowds, keeping my head down, kicking up dust and sand and feeling lost in all the smells and noises and confusion.

And there it was. Sitting right by the dock, as if waiting for me. A golden-burnished boat with white sails, full of sunshine and breeze, and a knot of slender alluring snakes on the prow. And a black-eyed sinuous woman standing on board, her dress rippling about her legs and hugging her curves, smiling a low secretive smile just for me.

"Worthy of leering and a couple of dirty compliments," I said, folding my arms over my chest. "What do you look like on the third and fourth plane, I wonder?"

"Not as nice as this." The woman bared white teeth--no-one in Egypt had teeth as white as that. "What do you think?" and she let down her shields.

A marid. A *marid*. By all the gods.

"Bye, Ptolemy," Penrenutet announced, and rose into the air. Affa sped along behind him, two dragonflies disappearing into the sky.

"Why *are* you here?" the woman asked casually. "I can drain your master dry on my master's orders, making his heart and soul--and considerable fortune--slave to my will, but you... well. Like I said, I'm not quite so nice on the other planes."

"Not Ptolemy," I say, firmly.

"Master's orders." She's purring, sleek as a cat, slinking forward. "You know how it is, sweet. Be a good djinn and go."

"Bite Mogret's arse," I shot back, and aimed a Detonation straight at her eyes.

Why did I do it? Why in all the nine billion gods' names? She screeched, of course, and everyone in the market panicked, and there was water flooding everywhere and crashing into buildings and I nearly half-drowned in those first few moments. I barely managed to get my head above the waves and transformed into a fish, darting down; she snapped her gnashing shark jaws two inches from my face, and chased me down the cataracts of the Nile.

But she kept bumping into the stone walls, thrashing and flipping boats over. I'd caught her off guard. I'd actually wounded her across her eyes, she couldn't actually see. Laughing I took a swipe at her and it glanced off her snout; she changed into a squid and wrapped four tentacles around me, squeezing bubbles roughly out of my throat.

I aimed another Detonation with the slightest twitch of my finger, gasping for breath, and she let go, just briefly--just two seconds, just long enough. I floundered my way to the surface and shot into the air, a seagull; she rocketed up and snapped at me with a pelican's beak, squawking with pain.

"Hah!" I crowed, screeching in seagull language (3). "Bite Mogret's arse? You can kiss mine!"

"No problem," she snarled back, murder in her eyes, and I felt a searing pain before tumbling down into the water, wings limp and outspread, flailing about in the surface. She dove down, her beak outstretched, ready to go for the kill.

I was saved just in time by Ptolemy, summoning me to the palace. The guards and sentries of the market had reported a disaster on the Nile--a sudden storm, a flash flood, surges of water that had ruined two docks and capsized several boats. "The boat," Ptolemy was panting, running his fingers through his hair. "The boat, is it alright? Is she alright?"

I stared up at him from the floor, my limbs all splayed out in an undignified wreck. There was a burning pain on my backside, making very dignified and perfectly acceptable tears stand in my eyes, and it was all on the tip of my tongue. She was a marid, she was trying to kill you, I was saving your life--

Ptolemy's stupid googly eyes were huge and focused on mine, searching my face.

"The boat overturned," I said groggily, wiping at my face. "I don't know what happened." Something in my chest tightened, a little bit, and I added, "I'm sorry."

He sent me out time and time again, to search for her in the wreckage; I skulked in the marketplace and avoided the Nile, keeping an eye out for the marid. I saw her once, drifting along in the boat with the snakes coiled on the prow; she turned and saw me, through the slats of the buildings, and I expected a glare or a reaction. But she merely looked impassive before turning away.

Who was your master? I wondered silently. Who's trying to kill Ptolemy?

I wandered silently home, sighing. My hand was straying to my backside, rubbing absent-mindedly; Ptolemy said the scar would fade in time, and had given me a strange odd look as he said. I glared back at him, as his lips twitched just the tiniest bit, and he subsided into a cough.

Small wonder. And small wonder you asked about the story of the scar.

Mind you, I mention this only casually: if you ever mention to anyone that I have a scar in the shape of a kiss print down there, I will personally disembowel you myself. You understand how it goes.

\--

(1) Mogret is the name of a toothy, snarling, salivating afrit that keeps shedding his tail every month and eats the tail of another creature to restore his. He is also not real. "Mogret got your tail" is the djinn phrase for calling another djinn a liar, and when slacking off and lazing about on their duties, foliots and imps will tell their masters they were delayed by Mogret chasing them. Humans have dedicated whole libraries to trying to find out Mogret's identity and summon him; it's quite amusing.

(2) Not that a djinn can actually get drunk off anything a human could brew up or squeeze out. But it was very expensive imported wine from Syria, in a very expensive ewer, and the looks the other servants gave them in passing were probably worth the wretched taste.

(3) Which is indescribably filthy and not for proper demons to use.

 


End file.
